A year full of improvements and innovations is ending soon!After releasing the brand new MAXQDA 2022 at the end of 2021 with a fresh design and major additions such as Questions, Themes and Theories, we only took a short break over the holidays before we got right back to work in January.
Made by Researchers for Researchers
Many of our staff have a strong research background. We know from firsthand experience which challenges you face in your day-to-day life and strive to make MAXQDA the perfect companion during each step of your research journey.
Since the launch of the first program version in 1989, the team has been dedicated to continuously improving and developing MAXQDA. Your valuable feedback and input, which reaches us through multiple channels is a treasured source to ensure that MAXQDA meets your needs and helps you overcome any obstacles in your research.
Join us in a look back on the MAXQDA update highlights of 2022. Maybe you will discover a new tool that will make your data analysis even easier! Happy exploring.
Update 2022.1: Digital Data
Importing transcripts from Microsoft Teams or Zoom meetings (VTT files)
At the height of the pandemic, face-to-face interviews became impossible to conduct in person. Most communication had to be transferred to digital meeting tools, which quickly started offering automatic transcriptions in the VTT file format. To accommodate the suddenly widely used technology, MAXQDA was updated to offer a dedicated import that quickly transforms this file type into a clean transcript, tags speakers, identifies speaking pauses, and inserts time stamps.
Importing multiple web pages at once
The same update added a bulk import for web pages. Instead of collecting websites one by one (which has been possible for a long time with the MAXQDA Web Collector Chrome extension) – you could now import as many web pages as you wanted at once. And the feature lets you add any relevant information like notes, dates, or any other values alongside the web pages, which enables you to quickly group and analyze the websites later.
Sentiment Analysis for Survey Data
Sentiment Analysis is a valuable tool for quickly perceiving emotions, feelings, and opinions of individuals towards a certain issue, product, service, or event in different application fields. This feature was already available for Twitter data, but 2022.1 implemented the same technology for survey analysis. It was now possible to analyze the tone of the responses in a dataset and/or to code responses with their sentiment scores.
Update 2022.2: Statistical Analysis
MAXQDA is known for its powerful Mixed Methods tools, one of them a full-on statistics package Stats. This module enables researchers to statistically analyze qualitative data or import and connect quantitative data sets.
Update 2022.2 elevated the statistical feature package improving interactivity between statistical results and MAXQDA project data. For example, researchers can create new document sets directly from a statistical output screen to integrate quantitative findings with their qualitative data. The update also implemented new statistical tests, and visualizations.
Update 2022.3: Codes & Summaries
Code Explorer Dashboard
Update number three in contrast had a strong focus on qualitative research. It introduced the interactive Code Explorer dashboard that you can use to explore how a code has been used across your data and your own writing. With just one click you can now find out which other topics might be related to a code, dig into the most used terms within the coded data, and as always click any element to dive deeper into the original data.
Improved Summary Tools
The same update improved the Summary tools to simplify the workflow of summarizing coded segments into your own words and building your own tables to compare summaries across cases or topics. These analytical tasks take an incredible amount of focus and time; the improvements were carefully chosen to make your work easier and add more visibility to your data so you can focus on the interpretation.
Update 2022.4: Words in Documents
Word Trends
The last update in the year 2022 added a new and powerful explorative visual tool to MAXQDA that you can use to explore how frequently different words occur in different document sections. With the new Word Trends, you can quickly find out which topics play a key role at the beginning or the end of a longer text or use the visualization as a starting point for deeper text searches. Let MAXQDA fill the graph automatically with the most frequent words in the text, or search for specific words relevant for your research.
Many more innovations in the pipeline for 2023
In 2023 we look forward to continuing our path and introducing new innovations and improvements that make it easier to analyze your data and share your findings with the world.
We cannot wait for the new year and wish you happy and relaxing holidays!
